Bob
Shrum, the pricey Washington hired gun, is the tête pensant of
John Kerry’s campaign. A veteran of the latter-day JFK’s Senate races,
Shrummy, as he’s known to friend and foe alike, attached himself to
Kerry like a mollusk early on in this presidential effort. He’s the
first to have the senator’s ear in the morning and the last to whisper
in it at night. Not much gets by Shrummy, who is known for his sharp
elbows.

Unless Kerry is
caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy (to borrow ex–Louisiana
Governor Edwin Edwards’ colorful metaphor for a campaign-crippling
scandal), the junior senator from Massachusetts will be coronated in
Boston as the Democrats’ nominee. So it’s not too early to pose the
question: Is Shrum up to beating Karl Rove?

Shrum is a Democratic
political consultant so much in demand that, before he signed on to
Kerry’s campaign, inside-the-Beltway journalists were speculating in
print on which candidate would win “the Shrum primary.”

A Harvard-trained
lawyer, Shrum first made his reputation as a gifted speechwriter. He
wrote for New York Mayor John V. Lindsay, was the principal pen for
Edmund Muskie’s 1972 White House run — then switched to George
McGovern when Muskie’s campaign imploded. In 1976, he signed up to
work for Jimmy Carter — but after only 10 days he quit and publicly
blasted Carter in a letter that hit the front pages, telling Carter “I
don’t believe you stand for anything other than yourself.” Most of
all, Shrum crafted Senator Edward Kennedy’s speeches for a decade. It
was writing for Teddy that cemented the mystique of the Shrum magic
touch. The most famous speech Shrum ever wrote was undoubtedly Teddy’s
1980 Democratic Convention soliloquy, “The dream shall never die” —
there was hardly a dry eye in the house when it was over.

Shrum eventually left
Teddy to capitalize on his connection to the Kennedy name and set up
as a consultant and ad maker. His specialty: giving a populist flavor
to a campaign. Shrum was the man behind the curtain in Dick Gephardt’s
xenophobic Japan-and-Korea-bashing ’88 presidential campaign. Shrummy
tried the same shtick for Bob Kerrey’s 1992 White House bid — it
flopped, in part because, as Joe Klein later reported, Kerrey
afterward “admitted he didn’t believe a word he was saying.”

Shrum didn’t work for
Bill Clinton — but, during the height of the Monica mess, he faxed a
speech to Clinton recommending Bubba admit to “sexual contact” with
Lewinsky, say “none of this should have happened,” and apologize.
Clinton refused to grovel, instead choosing a nonspecific admission to
a relationship that “was wrong” in a TV address attacking Ken Starr —
and got impeached. Remember Al Gore’s credibility-stretching switch
late in the 2000 campaign to “the people against the powerful” theme
that briefly revived his sinking fortunes? That was Shrum, brought in
as a doctor for the ailing Gore campaign.

Populism has made
Shrum quite rich. He took on a little-known but quite wealthy trial
lawyer named John Edwards and created the 1998 ad campaign that put
Edwards in the Senate. The same year, Shrum took a pile of dough from
a super-rich empty suit named Al Checchi and tried to make him
governor of California. Shrum campaigns made election-year populists —
and senators — out of rich-as-Croesus department-store heir Mark
Dayton in Minnesota, Goldman Sachs head Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and
deep-pocketed lawyer Bill Nelson in Florida.

Shrum, together with
snarling strategist James Carville and pollster Stan Greenberg, formed
the Democracy Corps to give guidance to Democratic candidates. Their
consistent counsel in a series of influential memos: eschew debate
over foreign policy, stick to domestic issues. A 2002 memo released
just before the Iraq war vote counseled congressional Democrats who
wanted to win to support the war — just as Kerry did. Shrum has an ego
as big as the Goodyear blimp, a take-no-prisoners personality that
brooks no disagreements, and exudes a boundless self-confidence in his
own judgments that has a Medusa-like effect on insecure candidates,
who become addicted to Shrummy like Rush Limbaugh to Oxycontin. Shrum,
who jumped on board with Kerry in February of last year, is hungry for
a presidential winner after so many failed campaigns, and so has
allowed little daylight between himself and Kerry ever since.

There was a movement
to try to dump Shrum in the wake of Kerry’s disastrous speech
announcing his candidacy. Kerry’s campaign manager, centrist Jim
Jordan, and communications maven Chris Lehane (a Clintonista) wanted
the speech to attack frontrunner Howard Dean. (Lehane had crossed
swords bitterly with Shrum in the Gore campaign, demanding that Gore
attack Bush’s competence to be president — which Shrum opposed.) The
political press corps started writing about “the Shrum curse.”

And there was the
matter of Shrum’s campaign help for another wealthy candidate —
Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. There’s a bit of hypocrisy in this
tale. Shrum and his wife, Mary Louise Oates, have long had a
particular interest in the gay-equality movement. When the Human
Rights Campaign, the wealthiest gay lobby, endorsed GOP pit bull
Senator Al D’Amato of New York for re-election, Shrum and his wife
resigned from the HRC board in protest. (The HRC CEO who engineered
that endorsement, Elizabeth Birch, is now the Dean campaign’s “senior
advisor” in charge of the gay vote.) But to Shrum, Arnold’s
Republicanism was somehow less repugnant than D’Amato’s.

However, when the
Kerry campaign shakeup came, it was Jordan and Lehane who were
unceremoniously fired, while Shrum stayed on the Kerry campaign plane,
sticking closer to his tiger than ever. Jordan was replaced by Mary
Beth Cahill, like Shrum a former Teddy K. staffer with a sharp-edged,
ball-crushing style. Cahill brought in a raft of new staffers, many
also with Kennedy links (like communications director Stephanie
Cutter).

Was Shrum responsible
for Kerry’s remarkable turnaround in Iowa that set the senator on the
road to nomination? Not exactly, according to Kerry’s hometown paper,
The Boston Globe, which credits adman Jim Margolis (a member of
media consultant Frank Grier’s stable) with creating a spot featuring
Kerry’s Vietnam boat mate Del Sandusky praising Kerry’s “unfailing
instinct and unchallengeable leadership,” an ad that overcame voter
ignorance of Kerry’s wartime service as revealed in focus groups. At
the same time, another Kerry ad slammed candidates who want to raise
taxes on the middle class (meaning Dean and Dick Gephardt). This
one-two punch, coupled with an infusion of Shrum-style populism on the
stump, proved the winning formula.

Shrum is the master
of the slash-and-burn negative campaign ad — a good skill to have when
going up against the likes of Karl Rove. But, with his overstuffed
bank account and three decades as a Washington insider, does the
wealthy Shrum — now 60 — still have the common touch necessary to
convert the NASCAR dads and soccer moms to the Kerry cause against a
White House command skilled at manipulating the electorate? Put
another way, can Shrummy make a credible sow’s ear out of Kerry and
his silk purse? Can Shrum create a campaign that resonates deeply
enough with voters to withstand the inevitable gay-baiting attack on
the “Boston Democrats” that the gay marriage Massachusetts court
decisions affords the Republicans?

The answers may well
tell us whether George Bush can be defeated in November.

Doug Ireland is a New York-based
media critic and commentator whose articles appear regularly in The
Nation, Tom Paine.com, and In These Times among many others. This
article first appeared in the
LA Weekly.